es to the gorgeous
palace, which had "white, green, and blue hangings, fastened with
cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble;
the beds were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue,
and white, and black marble ".[145] Beyond Elam were the plains,
plateaus, and grassy steppes occupied by the Medes and other peoples
of Aryan speech. Cultural influences came and went like spring winds
between the various ancient communities.

For ten long centuries Sumer and Akkad flourished and prospered ere we
meet with the great Hammurabi, whose name has now become almost as
familiar as that of Julius Caesar. But our knowledge of the leading
historical events of this vast period is exceedingly fragmentary. The
Sumerians were not like the later Assyrians or their Egyptian
contemporaries--a people with a passion for history. When inscriptions
were composed and cut on stone, or impressed upon clay tablets and
bricks, the kings selected as a general rule to record pious deeds
rather than to celebrate their victories and conquests. Indeed, the
average monarch had a temperament resembling that of Keats, who
declared:

The silver flow
Of Hero's tears, the swoon of Imogen,
Fair Pastorella in the bandits' den,
Are things to brood on with more ardency
Than the death day of empires.

The Sumerian king was emotionally religious as the great English poet
was emotionally poetical. The tears of Ishtar for Tammuz, and the
afflictions endured by the goddess imprisoned in Hades, to which she
had descended for love of her slain husband, seemed to have concerned
the royal recorder to a greater degree than the memories of political
upheavals and the social changes which passed over the land, like the
seasons which alternately brought greenness and gold, barrenness and
flood.

City chronicles, as a rule, are but indices of obscure events, to
which meagre references were sometimes also made on mace heads, vases,
tablets, stelae, and sculptured monoliths. Consequently, present-day
excavators and students have often reason to be grateful that the
habit likewise obtained of inscribing on bricks in buildings and the
stone sockets of doors the names of kings and others. These records
render obscure periods faintly articulate, and are indispensable for
comparative purposes. Historical clues are also obtained from lists of
year names. Each city king named a year in celebration of